future revenue at risk vs near term cost ratio

[mleber at he.net (Mike Leber)]

On 6/19/11 10:47 PM, Paul Vixie wrote:
>> Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2011 22:32:59 -0700
>> From: Doug Barton<dougb at dougbarton.us>
>>
>> ... the highly risk-averse folks who won't unconditionally enable IPv6
>> on their web sites because it will cause problems for 1/2000 of their
>> customers.
> let me just say that if i was making millions of dollars a day and i had
> the choice of reducing that by 1/2000th or not i would not choose to
> reduce it.  as much as i love the free interchange of ideas i will point
> out that commerce is what's paid the internet's bills all these years.

Fortunately, 1/2000th was just the now proven false boogey man that 
people substituted as a placeholder for the unknown.  Now that we've had 
World IPv6 Day, this has been clearly refuted.  No, 1 out 2000 users did 
not get fatally broken due to deploying IPv6.

That said, lets run with your revenue at risk theme... (well you did say 
you were severely concerned about that 1/2000th of your revenue!)

What if the risk of you not enabling it was that at some later date you 
lose 1/10th of your revenue due to either competitive pressures or the 
inability to provide the next generation service customers want?  (Or if 
you are a non profit, what if it meant that you can't service 10 percent 
of your user base in the way they want.)

Assuming the company is a company that generates all of its revenue from 
the Internet, what if you were an investor with 1 billion invested in 
that company?  What is the discounted future revenue at risk to near 
term cost ratio that you would tolerate due to not actively deploying 
IPv6?  What would the lack of concrete progress in the form of real 
world deployment say about the company's prospects as a cutting edge 
technology company?  (heh, time to diversify that portfolio?)

(I know you actually are running IPv6, just posing these entertaining 
questions since you provided the opening.)

Mike.
ps. not expecting an answer since it's rhetorical and posed for fun.